WB4SON

This past Tuesday, my wife and I (and our lab Jaclyn) headed out to the three RI parks furthest from our house: Simmons Mill, Sapowet Marsh, and Haines State Park.  It was about an hour to the furthest one, and we were back home about six hours later.  One station, WB4KTU, Loyce in Alabama, managed to work me in all three parks.  Another hat-trick!

With 36 parks completed, I’m in position 45 (Top 5%) for 2021, and in the top 7% since the program began.

After completing 30 unique park activations yesterday, my “Gold Activator” certificate arrived today:

I continue to gather metrics on activations.  I noted in doing three activations yesterday that my old Toughbook CF-30 laptop had used 30% of it’s battery capacity, indicating I could have done 6 to 8 parks on a single charge.  In addition all three activations took 5.7 AH from my LiFePO4 battery.  The QSO rate was close to one a minute in all three parks, and I was on the air for about 30 minutes at each park.  While doing three parks in a row was fun, I’m fairly certain that doing four would have lowered the “fun” factor significantly.  In the future I’ll try to do 2 or 3 activations in a day.

The POTA group keeps track of Activation and Hunting activities with a Leaderboard.  You can look at it two ways, either by year, or overall.  I noted that I am in the top 10% of activators both overall and for 2021.  That just says it is fairly easy to make a significant impact even though there are thousands of people participating (9,586 as of today, making 2.3 million contacts)

Today was a glorious weather day here in Rhode Island, so my wife and our yellow lab piled into the van and headed out for three park activations (Lynn and Jaclyn walk the park trails while I jabber on the air).  We wound up at East Beach State Park (K-7865), then Kimball Wildlife Management Area (K-7518), and finished the day at Burlingame State Park (K-2871).

All three activations went swimmingly with 20 or more contacts completed in about 20-30 minutes.  The parks were only a few miles from each other.

Amazingly enough, three people managed to work me in all three parks, earning themselves a RI-POTA Hat Trick:

• • Neil K7SEN
  • Tom W8NWG
  • Dave N9VFR

I am indebted to everyone who works me during an activation, continuously reaffirming that Amateur Radio is a wonderful hobby.  Being able to get outside these past few months has saved my sanity.  So thanks to Jason W3AAX and all the POTA administrators, and especially the regional coordinators (a shout-out to my 4-area regional coordinator, Bill Deloach, K4WP, who has processed all of my 30 logs).